U.S. government shutting down in fiscal impasse

Just off the floor of the Senate, the hands on the famous Ohio Clock inch toward 12 midnight, the deadline for Congress to reach an agreement on funding the government, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday night, Sept. 30, 2013. The Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate are at an impasse, neither side backing down over Obamacare after House GOP conservatives linked the funding bill to obstructing President Obama's signature health care law. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

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WASHINGTON — A flurry of last-minute moves by the House, Senate and White House late Monday failed to break a bitter budget standoff over President Barack Obama’s health care law, setting in motion the first government shutdown in nearly two decades.

After a series of rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers, leaders of the House and Senate acknowledged there would not be a resolution in time to stop a shutdown, even as the House took steps to open talks. But Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, dismissed as game-playing a House proposal to begin conference committee negotiations.

“We will not go to conference with a gun to our heads,” he said, demanding that the House accept the Senate’s six-week stopgap-spending bill, which has no policy prescriptions, before negotiations begin.

The impasse meant that 800,000 federal workers were to be furloughed and more than a million others would be asked to work without pay.

In the hours leading up to the deadline, House Republican leaders won approval, in a vote of 228-201, of a new plan to tie further government spending to a one-year delay in a requirement that individuals buy health insurance. The House proposal would deny federal subsidies to members of Congress, Capitol Hill staff, executive branch political appointees, White House staff, and the president and vice president, who would be forced to buy their health coverage on the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges.

But 57 minutes later, and with almost no debate, the Senate killed the House health care provisions and sent the stopgap spending bill right back, free of policy prescriptions. Earlier in the day, the Senate had taken less than 25 minutes to convene and dispose of a weekend budget proposal by the House Republicans.

“They’ve lost their minds,” Reid said before disposing of the House bill. “They keep trying to do the same thing over and over again.”

The federal government was then left essentially to run out of money at midnight, the end of the fiscal year, although the president signed a measure late Monday that would allow members of the military to continue to be paid.

“One faction in one branch of government doesn’t get to shut down the entire government just to refight the results of an election,” Obama said in the White House briefing room as the clock ticked to midnight. “You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job.”

Obama called House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, but they spoke for less than 10 minutes, without any sign of progress.

“I talked to the president tonight,” the speaker said on the House floor. He summed up Obama’s remarks as: “I’m not going to negotiate. I’m not going to negotiate.”

Copyright The New York Times News Service.

PHOTO: Just off the floor of the Senate, the hands on the famous Ohio Clock inch toward 12 midnight, the deadline for Congress to reach an agreement on funding the government, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday night, Sept. 30, 2013. The Republican-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate are at an impasse, neither side backing down over Obamacare after House GOP conservatives linked the funding bill to obstructing President Obama's signature health care law. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON —The Senate on Monday quickly rejected a House proposal to fund the government only if Democrats agreed to delay or undo parts of the 2010 health law as House Republicans gathered in the Capitol to plot their response in the escalating budget fight.Within minutes of convening just after 2 p.m., the Senate on a 54-46 vote followed through on Democratic threats to strip the health c